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Rh son for a moment in regard to intellectual vigour or influence on the Church's thought with the Gnosticism of Alexandria. Irenæus and Hippolytus discussed and condemned a great variety of Gnostic systems; but all the while they had in mind the one system of Valentiuus as the most serious rival of Catholic orthodoxy, winning its converts in the cultivated and fashionable Christian society at Home as well as in many parts of the empire—and probably Valentinus was an Alexandrian.

Then it was in Alexandria that speculative Christian theology sprang up in opposition to the dangerous disintegrating Gnosticism of the heretics as itself a true gnosis. Clement calls the enlightened Christian a Gnostic. In his De Principiis Origen gives us the earliest treatise on systematic theology in the Church. These scholars of Alexandria wrote in Greek; they belonged to the northern Hellenised community of Christians; but we must not forget that this was on the Delta and by the Nile. Origen, the greatest of them all, was a Copt. Thus the most daring thinker in the early Church was not of the Hellenic stock, where we look first for the budding of the speculative intellect; he was of the race of men who built the Pyramids and Karnak, and wrote "the Book of the Dead," and gave the world the myth of Osiris.

Coming down a little later, we see Arianism—the heresy that most seriously divided the Church for two generations, the only heresy that ever had the upper hand in Christendom—first promulgated and first condemned in Egypt. But it is a remarkable fact that this system, while it arose at Alexandria, found more real support in Constantinople and other cities away from Egypt. That is one of the facts to be borne in mind when we find Origen and his school charged with the parentage of Arianism. A full enquiry brings out results in which two such very different scholars as Cardinal Newman and Professor Harnack are found for once to be agreeing. It is not to Alexandria, but to Antioch; not to Origen, but to Lucian, that we are to trace the seeds